To Cast Ourselves

I ended my last post with:

“What is really happening overall—if we are courageous enough to accept it, if we are courageous enough to conceptualize human ‘belief’ in a manner such as Jesus attributes to us—is a continual recapitulation of the belief-experience.  We reach out to the unknown.  We draw back.  We reach out to the alien.  We draw back.

“We have belief-experiences that we undergo through suffering and perhaps sacrifice, and we never want to face again the prospect of the journey to those belief-experiences.  And then we have to take again the journey to those belief-experiences.  That is what belief is, if we are ever to know it in truth.”

That is what belief is—the last thing (as I suspect for most of us) that we want belief to be.  Of course, the aspiring believer will usually declare his or her willingness to suffer anything in exchange for the possession of a satisfying belief scheme.  And then (as I would hope for all of us) we discover that one of the least likely things to experience in a valid belief system is satisfaction.

On the other hand, a person who claims to possess a satisfying belief system is a person for whom the sting of all questions has been soothed.  I say “sting,” since there is nothing about a satisfying belief system that requires all questions to be answered—the believer has merely to be assured that God (or whatever conceptualization of divinity) will take care of everything of substance.  For the believer, questions are either answered or rendered innocuous.

The conceptual realm—however “awe-inspiring” or “mysterious” or even “scary”—that the believer inhabits is really the world of the believer.  As a parallel example, the most determined materialist can maintain that the universe is purely physical (while yet, of course, entertaining the notion of “ideas” and such as subjective manifestations of that physicality), but in the experiences of living, “the world” of the materialist exists as a set of ideas.  The concept of the world-globe is real to the materialist, as is the experience of occupying an infinitesimal portion of its surface, but “the world” as a whole cannot be encompassed by the materialist’s vision nor spanned by his or her grasp.  “The world” of human experience is an idea.

Similarly, the believer in a religion exists in a world of concepts.  For the believer, it may be God and not some notion of curling space-time (or some such) that exists as the periphery of everything that can be conceptualized, but the upshot is the same.  A satisfying belief system is a “world.”  I say this as something extremely important, because—as I have written before—the totality of one’s experiences in a world is really nothing more than a life.  We are “roused, readied, reaped.”  We are born to a set of experiences that surround us—and their impenetrability is coterminous in our experience with any notions we might have of “infinity” or of “the extent of the universe”—the verbalized meta-horizon of our world.

So much for “roused.”  To be “readied” is to affect, and to be affected by, our circumstances (though, sad to say, there is no guarantee that we are being “readied” in what we might term proper fashion.)  And then we are “reaped”—tossed into some hereafter realm not merely as ourselves but as ourselves refined or degraded by our experiences here.  It is small wonder that we might want all of this to “make sense”—and indeed it is no great sin to want all of this to “make sense”—but this is all of a piece: our life in our world.

Jesus will deny us our lives.  Jesus will deny us our worlds.  “Life” is dying to what the world knows as life.  And the world that we know is to be supplanted by the Kingdom of God.

But how?  The question remains, “How?”

We exist, and we are surrounded by what we think of as “not us.”  That which—in our estimation—constitutes our “selves” is defined by us in contradistinction to whatever is not our “selves.”  We are alive in the world, and we are not the world.

It has been the common human approach to religion, as far as being alive in the world is concerned, to consider that we must do good things, and not do evil things.  The history of Christian doctrine, however (“Christian” being inclusively defined) has ranged from blunt assertions that “good” people go to Heaven, all the way to assertions that no observable (nor indeed internally ratified) “good” aspects need be seen in an Elect to whom are attributed the boundless goodness of the Savior.

And so, despite the vast differences in theology, the denominations share what I described just above.  To repeat myself, we exist, and we are surrounded by what we think of as “not us.”  That which—in our estimation—constitutes our “selves” is defined by us in contradistinction to whatever is not our “selves.”  We are alive in the world, and we are not the world.

But Jesus says we are to give up our lives for the kingdom of God.  Jesus says we are not to live in “this world,” but in the kingdom of God.  How then can we attempt to follow the dictates of Jesus without merely going about throwing up quotation marks all over the place?  For that is really all that theologians do—saying that we need to give up “our lives” for “life in Christ,” that we need to forsake “the world” for “the kingdom of God.”  Actually, that is not all that theologians do.  Having started off with quotation marks, they graduate to capital letters, and we must read of Truth and Freedom, or worse yet, of Real Truth and Real Freedom.

Yet still the question remains.  In the conceptual framework of the challenges leveled at us by Jesus, what are we to make of the persistent question of how to act in the context of what we find facing us?  We are roused to our individual existences, and we must face the passing of time, and we must face the passing of ourselves from the realm that we detect around us.  How can Jesus be presenting a graspable challenge, when he tells us to give up our worldly lives for lives in another world?

I contend that Jesus makes no demands of us that are not implicit yet inescapable “in the beginning” to which he refers repeatedly.  A persistent thread in Jesus’ teaching is for us to be responsible for telling right from wrong, while yet he assumes that our lives will be governed largely by religious dictates that we could scarcely begin in our individual lives to sort out, or to examine in minute detail, or to discard as necessary.

He asks which of us will not lift an animal out of a pit on the Sabbath.  He is not telling us to decide that all religious rules are wrong.  He is not telling us to be Jews, or not to be Jews.  He is telling us that our lives in the world are analyzable in terms that defy the boundaries of our existences.  Our existences, as our inclinations will naturally direct us, are understood by us as the placing of our attentions to what is right and what is wrong.  In the world of Jesus, in the kingdom of God, right and wrong, good and evil, are all that exist.  Nothing changes but the notion of what we see with our eyes and hear with our ears.

Adam and Eve were not thrown into a world of despair because they were given the ability to know what was right and what was wrong.  They were thrown into a world of despair because they were thrust into the realm of the challenge that Jesus has for us—our eyes were opened, the eyes of our race were opened, to know good and evil, not to know WHAT is good or WHAT is evil.

Our lives are good and evil, permeating everything about us and everything around us.  Our worlds are good and evil, permeating everything about us and everything around us.  We are angels and devils moment by moment.  When Jesus called Peter “Satan,” it was because no more powerful word was available, not because he was “trying to make a point.”  When Jesus told a crowd that they were children of the devil, he would have known full well, if he was “trying to make a point,” that some people might have misunderstood or some might have only half-heard him.  In our usual mind-set, we would be troubled that some people might mistakenly really assume that they had truly been equated with the devil.  Yet what ought that to be to us?  A thousand times a day we deserve to be called “the Devil,” and we know it.

A thousand times a day we face the quandary I opened with:

“We have belief-experiences that we undergo through suffering and perhaps sacrifice, and we never want to face again the prospect of the journey to those belief-experiences.  And then we have to take again the journey to those belief-experiences.  That is what belief is, if we are ever to know it in truth.”

To be born again, to be born from above, is to throw ourselves at what is good.  None of this has to do with any life-experiences necessarily translatable into things done by us as individuals in the world—as though we as individuals mattered, or as though the world mattered.  When Jesus glorified God, Jesus was throwing himself at what is good.  When Jesus cried out, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”, Jesus was throwing himself at what is good.

Our duty is to cast ourselves at the Perfect Other who is the Perfect God.  The only commonality we might have with God is a sense of good rather than evil, and that sense is the only abiding torment that we face.  This is the architecture of the life that we must find in the kingdom of which Jesus speaks.  How this will happen for us is unsurprising.  As I quoted myself above:

“We reach out to the unknown.  We draw back.  We reach out to the alien.  We draw back.”

To Know It in Truth

I ended my last post with:

“The Good Thief throws himself across the void of his suffering and into the arms of One whose character is utterly alien to himself.  I think there is much to be found in examination of our duty to embrace likewise a reality in Jesus that is utterly alien to the reality we possess.”

The Good Thief is caught up in an episode of unimaginable torment—torment heightened perhaps by elements of his story that might make the characterization “Good Thief” seem as quaint as it is.  Whatever evil deeds he committed, they seem to him such as might be satisfied only by the loss of his life—perhaps the loss of his soul.

The Good Thief has all of his prospects—dismal though they be—before him.  He chooses in his agony to ratify a conceptualization of innocent suffering—and of unimaginably gracious forbearance of human frailty—presented to him by his witnessing of Jesus’ crucifixion.  The Good Thief imagines that he and his fellow criminal are similar in their misdeeds and their just punishments, yet the Good Thief reaches out to that which is alien to him.

We do not know what happened to the Good Thief—or to his spiritual life—in the ensuing few hours of his earthly existence.  Perhaps it is even the case (for who would wish it differently?) that he and his criminal fellow were insensate by the time their legs were broken.  What we do know is that—as we humans experience that which captures our attention—crucifixion is the last thing that happened to the Good Thief.

The Good Thief was not cast to the ground and released fortuitously from his bonds by the earthquake, nor was he allowed to escape with his life in the confusion that would follow.  He was not given a chance to feel his momentary connection to Jesus fade.  He was not given a chance to face again hunger or fear or any of the other travails that would hound him as an escaped criminal.  He was not given a chance to assume his old life, and he was not given a chance to wonder if his feverish petition to the doomed preacher was merely a blurring recollection.

The Good Thief, hanging in his last moments on a cross, was dealt as final a fate as that which seized Judas, swinging from the tree.  Yet just as the finality of Judas in the context of his treachery is to be contrasted to the drawn-out out agonies of Peter (and his equally undistinguished ten comrades) in the aftermath of their flight, so also the experience of the Good Thief is to be contrasted to that which might happen to any of us, seized as we might be in some mood with fervent conviction and then, in some ensuing frame of mind, overcome with doubts—doubts perhaps of even the most fundamental aspects of the “faith” that we had at once believed we possessed.

I say this not as mere conjecture.  Jesus dealt at length with the disciples on precisely this score.  The chief repository of this teaching is the Gospel of John—the gospel that includes almost at its very beginning Jesus needling Nathanael about his sophomoric notions of what might cause a person to hail Jesus as “the Son of God,” “the King of Israel”:

“Because I said unto thee, I saw thee under the fig tree, believest thou?  Thou shalt see greater things than these” (1:50).  Jesus is going to deal with his disciples about belief, and there are going to be hard lessons.

Indeed, it can be scarcely sufficient to say that Jesus teaches the disciples—and us—hard lessons about belief.  Were it not for our persistent ability to succumb to distractions or to let our memories fade—which ought to give us pause about whether we are serious enough about our eternal fates—we would really have cause to claim that Jesus administers to us not lessons, but tortures.  All one need do is gather—even for the heightened concentration of a few moments—the various parts of the ending of John, in order to perceive the architecture of that torment.

The first interaction that Jesus has with a disciple at the start of what is conventionally called The Farewell Discourses is an interaction with Peter:

“Simon Peter said unto him, Lord, whither goest thou?  Jesus answered him, Whither I go, thou canst not follow me now; but thou shalt follow me afterwards.  Peter said unto him, Lord, why cannot I follow thee now?  I will lay down my life for thy sake.  Jesus answered him, Wilt thou lay down thy life for my sake?  Verily, verily, I say unto thee, The cock shall not crow, till thou has denied me thrice.”

And the Gospel of John ends with Peter in the agony of being asked—thrice—by Jesus if he loves Jesus.  Between the bookends of these two episodes is the text of Jesus’ most explicit teachings about belief.  The teachings are timeless, but their delivery in the text is punctuated by momentary and electric interactions between Jesus and the disciples:

“Let not your heart be troubled: ye believe in God, believe also in me.  In my Father’s house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you . . .”

So the predispositions of the disciples, not just their experiences of Jesus’ ministry, can be understood as part of the understandings between the disciples and Jesus.

“And whither I go ye know, and the way ye know.  Thomas saith unto him, Lord, we know not whither thou goest; and how can we know the way?”

And:

“If ye had known me, ye should have known my Father also: and from henceforth ye know him, and have seen him.  Philip saith unto him, Lord, shew us the Father, and it sufficeth us.”

And so Jesus is telling the disciples what they know, and yet they know not that they know it. 

A short while later Jesus says:

“Believe me that I am in the Father, and the Father in me: or else believe me for the very works sake.”

And so Jesus is telling the disciples that they need to believe that he is to be identified with the Father—but, failing that, they can at least believe that he speaks with divine truth because he does things that human beings ought not—in human estimation—to be able to do.

It is no great stretch to contend that the disciples, for all the benefit they have had of three years of Jesus’ ministry, are little better off than the Good Thief.  They are presented with the opportunity to follow a leader who is too good to be true, and they must decide if they will venture into an alien experience-realm in which that which is too good to be true can yet be true.

No one can really do what Jesus is asking, and Jesus knows that no one can really do what he is asking.  This is revealed when he says to the disciples:

“These things have I spoken unto you in proverbs: but the time cometh, when I shall no more speak unto you in proverbs, but I shall shew you plainly of the Father.”

For his pains, Jesus has the disciples say to him a few moments later:

“Lo, now speakest thou plainly, and speakest no proverb.  Now are we sure that thou knowest all things, and needest not that any man should ask thee: by this we believe that thou camest forth from God.”

And in reply, almost as though nothing of substance had been imparted since Jesus’ exchange with the credulous Nathanael:

“Jesus answered them, Do ye now believe?  Behold, the hour cometh, yea, is now come, that ye shall be scattered, every man to his own, and shall leave me alone: and yet I am not alone, because the Father is with me.  These things I have spoken unto you, that in me ye might have peace.  In the world ye shall have tribulation, but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world.”

The believer in Jesus will believe, and then will not believe.  And then it will all happen again.  The believer in Jesus will believe in an explicit theology of Jesus, and then will believe in an untethered theology that flails and grasps at what seems like truth.  It is not strange that such things happen.  Indeed, they will happen.  Jesus knows they will happen.

What is really happening overall—if we are courageous enough to accept it, if we are courageous enough to conceptualize human “belief” in a manner such as Jesus attributes to us—is a continual recapitulation of the belief-experience.  We reach out to the unknown.  We draw back.  We reach out to the alien.  We draw back.

We have belief-experiences that we undergo through suffering and perhaps sacrifice, and we never want to face again the prospect of the journey to those belief-experiences.  And then we have to take again the journey to those belief-experiences.  That is what belief is, if we are ever to know it in truth.

A Reality in Jesus

In my last post I wrote of Jesus’ commands to his followers as being impractical (to put it mildly) means of establishing “affinity with all Creation that makes sense only in light of a call to reach out to an awesome dis-affinity—communion with God, the Perfect Other.”  The world—Creation--is the thing with which we may interact (or at least it is in the world where we might strive to interact with the divine), yet of course we are at all times expected to reach out for the otherworldly.

Unfortunately, we tend often to morph our responsibility to reach out for the otherworldly into a fancied responsibility to reach out for an “another-worldly.”  That is, we assign God to an abode that we visualize as some sort of parallel universe to our own.  Such illegitimate (or at least imprudent) assignment of God to “his heaven” merely degrades our appreciation of him, and I mean this to apply even to protestations that “of course God is everywhere” or “no dimensions can contain God.”  The mere statement of God as being unbounded can reflect either a valid attempt to yield to his ineffable nature, or it can reflect something unseemly like God visualized as a sort of all-seeing time-traveler.

Ultimately, despite our most earnest attempts at piety reflected in characterizing God in poetic or evocative terms, we are in fact deprived (and quite rightly) of any substance to our conceptualizations of God.  God is not the best of this or that, nor the highest of this or that.  Granted, there is nothing wrong in the immediate sense of our musings about God as the best and the highest, but almost immediately all such musings will shudder apart.  God is the author of qualities, not merely the paradigm of (positive) qualities.

What then is the conceptually-translatable version of God (or at least the best available of such versions of God) to which we can pin our attempts at communion with him?  As ever, I will defer to the utterances of Jesus.  When Jesus refers to the Comforter, he refers simultaneously to “the Spirit of truth.”  Of course, when we think of the divine, we are quite correct to think of such things as love, charity, mercy, forgiveness, and if we reckon—again, quite correctly—that we can never really comprehend God, we must admit that his love, his charity, his mercy, his forgiveness, and everything else we can attribute to God are worthy subjects for our contemplation, yet those are qualities that are understood by us in terms of God’s relationships with his creatures.  God’s truth, on the other hand, pre-exists any manifestation and stands—again, at least as far as we can imagine—as co-equivalent to God himself.

I do not claim to be able to assert simplistically that God is truth.  I cannot, however, ignore Jesus’ characterization of the Comforter in John as “the Spirit of truth,” and I cannot depart from the age-old association of the Comforter with the Spirit of God and therefore with God himself.  The persons of God will always be a mystery to mortals.  Additionally, the quality of “truth” is especially acute as an understood aspect of the divine alone.  We mortals can love too much, can be charitable in excess of prudence, can be merciful even sometimes to the detriment of the recipients of our mercy, can be forgiving too soon, too much, or on too little evidence.  All these things we can do, but we can scarcely be too truthful.

Truthfulness seems to be an especial characteristic of God.  Indeed, it is difficult if not impossible for us to see how we could progress from one moment to another without the fanciful versions of our reality that we understand as “reality.”  Everything from our momentary sensations to our most sober philosophies constitute approximations, at best, of truth.  Something entirely truthful (if we are to be “truthful” with ourselves) would be alien to us.  The quintessence of truth would be the full knowledge of God, and as above I will defer to age-old wisdom that says a full knowledge of God would destroy us.  The truth of God is alien to us, despite any conceits we might possess about our desire for truth.  What we must desire, in the end, is communion with the Perfect Other—communion with the One who is as alien to us as he was to Adam.

Jesus’ teachings about the Comforter are contained to a great extent in his discourses in John, and for our purposes here I will present a lengthy quote:

“Nevertheless I tell you the truth; It is expedient for you that I go away: for if I go not away, the Comforter will not come unto you; but if I depart, I will send him unto you.  And when he is come, he will reprove the world of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment; Of sin, because they believe not on me; Of righteousness, because I go to my Father, and ye see me no more; Of judgment, because the prince of this world is judged.  I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now.  Howbeit when he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he will guide you into all truth: for he shall not speak of himself; but whatsoever he shall hear, that shall he speak: and he will shew you things to come.  He shall glorify me: for he shall receive of mine, and shall shew it unto you.  All things that the Father hath are mine: therefore said I, that he shall take of mine, and shall shew it unto you” (John 16:7-15).

What is most important about this passage from John for our purposes is its manifest emphasis on “the Spirit of truth” as more than an honorific.  The divine “Spirit of truth” here described is also presented as truth in its simplest form.  “Sin,” “righteousness,” and “judgment” will be addressed not by the visible imposition of an overt actor, but by truth itself.  “Howbeit when he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he will guide you into all truth: for he shall not speak of himself; but whatsoever he shall hear, that shall he speak: and he will shew you things to come.”  The truth presented here is both a crystal-clear transparency and a version of reality that must seem alien to us creatures, accustomed as we are to the conceits of our senses and of our limited understandings combining to form our “realities.”

I see this emphasis on “truth” (though our version of it ought really to carry the quotation marks) as being entirely indispensable to our understandings of certain Gospel accounts.  An example is that of the Good Thief.  The standard notions of the story are forced and shaky, because there is no reason to accept that the Good Thief possessed any knowledge base commonly identified with “Jesus’ message,” and—most importantly—there is little if anything in the story that reflects the things that we are commonly supposed to do to get salvation.  “Remember me when you come into your kingdom” is of no more substance than the ill-fated utterances of others who will say to Jesus, “Lord, Lord” and “Did we not drive out demons in your name?”

The Good Thief, however, does do one thing of note.  The Good Thief reckons that Jesus has been true to his obligations, and is being unjustly punished.  The Good Thief reckons that Jesus is true and that the accusations against him are false.  The Good Thief reckons that Jesus will be true to his word when he promises to remember the Good Thief.

The Good Thief throws himself across the void of his suffering and into the arms of One whose character is utterly alien to himself.  I think there is much to be found in examination of our duty to embrace likewise a reality in Jesus that is utterly alien to the reality we possess.

The Resolution of Things

In my last post I wrote:

“Creation is—in a manner existing before any subsequent specification—one thing.

“This is not idle musing.  It matters—most specifically it matters in terms of Jesus’ teaching—that all Creation is one Creation.  Such division that exists in Creation—to the extent that any division is real—exists in either a perfect, absolute sense through the will of God, or it exists in some provisional sense through the will of creatures.”

God made the universe.  God made Adam.  God made the universe and Adam was in that universe.  God made the universe and Adam was part of that universe.  All of these statements are true, and none of them are surprising.

However, it would be surprising to say that God made Adam and the universe was part of Adam—and yet the only thing that was of necessity “other” to Adam was God.  Adam’s random-seeming, impinging, uninvited passing thoughts might have seemed “other” to him.  Adam’s welling emotions might have seemed “other” to him.  Adam’s limbs and their capacity for space-filling, clumsiness, and discomfort might have seemed “other” to him.  Adam’s food and drink—and the sensations of ingesting them—might have seemed “other” to him.  The air that Adam breathed might have seemed “other” to him.  Adam’s physical surroundings (the physical surroundings by which his very bodily survival was made possible) might have seemed “other” to him.

This, again, is not idle musing.  God created Adam in a state of fellowship with God—although, in a manner reminiscent of the initial factual statement of Creation as created by God and yet pictured as pre-existing the narrative (“In the beginning . . .”), Adam’s state of fellowship with God is noted first in how it is past.  God’s first described observation of Adam (“It is not good that the man should be alone . . .”) reflects Adam’s shrinking from the pure Other.  Adam shows himself to be attuned not to a relationship that is yielding (his identity found in a melding with an Other that he trusts) but rather to a relationship (or set of relationships) that is referential.  That is, Adam will find his center of existence not in God, but in himself centered in an experience-realm where simultaneously he measures a distance from his surroundings so as to define himself, and also measures his surroundings by the proportions in which they reflect himself.

And so, God sets about addressing the less-than-optimal situation in which the man is “alone.”  The situation is an awkward one, and the reader of Genesis is not spared the awkwardness inherent in the impudent fashion in which the narrative smacks of approximation and adjustment on the part of God.  First, animals (drawn by God, it should be noted, from the substance of the earth, and not separately decreed into existence) are presented to Adam.  They will not suffice.  Then, the woman is drawn by God from the very substance of the man—as though the essential one-thing-ness of the universe is not a thing to be violated.

Adam’s apparent delight at the woman (“bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh”) is the epitome of the quandary of “otherness” in human experience.  We desire that which is simultaneously like us and not like us.  Of course, the matter is not so simple.  Our initial dissatisfaction with God extends to every corner of our existence.  The man and the woman did not enjoy perfect communion, despite the denomination’s fixation on a fairy-tale simplicity of a Fall disrupting a perfect Paradise.  As must be admitted, even an abrupt Fall had to be presaged by unseemly thoughts on the part of our ancestors.  (And even a casual observer can note that the “curses” after the eating of the forbidden fruit were intensifications of already-existing travails characteristic of human life.)

It is not for nothing that Jesus returns again and again to “the beginning” or to the ancient roots of his listeners’ heritage, for Jesus is addressing those things that are most fundamental in life.  There is, however, no warrant to assume that Jesus’ references to the past are mere ratifications of what we consider the “natural order.”  Genesis, if approached with vigorous honesty, is revealed to be an account that is (by the very logic that necessitates the unfolding narrative) an account of a degraded state of existence becoming progressively more degraded.  What we consider to be “nature” is a set of conflicts and competitions between actors, and this continues to be so even if the matter is by degrees relieved by episodes of cooperation or conciliation.

Ultimately, what Jesus points us toward is not a resolution of conflicts, but rather an essential resolving of humanity’s original predicament—a broken communion with God, the Perfect Other.  As far as our relationship with Creation is concerned, for all the practical advice that Jesus gives us about how to get along with others, the sublime advices (nay, commands) that Jesus gives us about how to seek salvation are eminently impractical.  To be perfect, to be one with each other and with Jesus, to reckon ourselves to be possessors of all kingdoms while yet possessing nothing, to reckon the leveling of mountains at the mere thought to be as automatic as commanding our limbs, to see the exertions and trials of all ages and places as bound up in a simple, momentary act like handing out a cup of water—all of these things bespeak a notion of affinity with all Creation that makes sense only in light of a call to reach out to an awesome dis-affinity—communion with God, the Perfect Other.

The Puzzle of Things

I asserted in my previous post that nothing possesses of necessity any substance comparable to that of God.  By “comparable,” I am not referring to a matter of degree, such as might be inherent in asserting that God is “incomparable” to any lesser or inferior thing.  “Comparable” in this context means exactly that: “possessing characteristics amenable to comparison.”  God is not like anything else.

“Anything else,” then, falls by necessity into a certain category: those things that are not God.  “Those things that are not God” share a certain characteristic: they are all created—they all constitute Creation.  Creation, then, is distinguished first and foremost by a commonality.  Creation is—in a manner existing before any subsequent specification—one thing.

This is not idle musing.  It matters—most specifically it matters in terms of Jesus’ teaching—that all Creation is one Creation.  Such division that exists in Creation—to the extent that any division is real—exists in either a perfect, absolute sense through the will of God, or it exists in some provisional sense through the will of creatures.

The initial division between God and Creation is hidden from us in Genesis.  “Creation” in Genesis is described as a generic premise (“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth”) or it is described as the provision of a counterbalance to an existing phenomenon (“Let there be light” presumes the existence of a created phenomenon of “darkness”) or it involves a schematic approximation of evolution (“Let the earth bring forth . . . .”)  “Creation” as an act, much though we might speak of it, is kept from us in the unspoken mysteries of the dark and hidden.  “The heaven and the earth” are not “created” for us in a retrospective display through the narrative.  Similarly, the conceptions of creatures are native to the inconceivable inner realms.  Even the “re-birth” of Jesus—so crucial to the logic of his ministry and so precious to the denominations’ presentations of their ministries—happens in the hidden realms and is described retrospectively, Genesis-like, in the Gospels (much to the frustration of the denominations.)

We are left, then, with a Creation that simply exists and that exists in its simplest form as one thing.  “Things”—entities that are described separately—are so described because God says they are separate or because creatures (let us confine “creatures” in this instance to “humans”) say they are separate.

Jesus provides an observation that dietary restrictions are untenable because what is taken in subsequently passes out.  If his contention here is taken at face value, one must conclude that Jesus would make a poor dietician.  Some of what is ingested becomes, of course, part of the body.  Some of it never leaves.  Jesus, however, maintains that the body is a thing, and also that the diet is an altogether separate thing,  There is a reason for Jesus’ logically untenable pronouncement about diet—he is describing impurity, and he maintains that true impurity is a pollution of the heart—of the inner person—and he is unconcerned here about how persons might pollute their innards.

We must contrast Jesus’ view here with Paul’s contention in First Corinthians that sexual immorality is particularly heinous in that it involves what a person does inside his or her body.  The “inside” part might lead to a little vagueness about what in particular is being done, but the matter scarcely deserves much analysis.  Paul’s contention is not merely specious in its assertion about the dishonoring of the body—clumsily described as part of Christ’s body, as though the imagery can well stand such simplicity.  Indeed, it is bad enough that Paul will describe the use of the body in, say, premarital sex, as especially egregious—as though employing one’s limbs in torturing an innocent or gesturing troops to perform a massacre would be a significantly less evil endeavor.

No, the most disturbing aspect of Paul’s “inside the body” take on sexual sin is that it flies in the face of Jesus’ painstaking assertions about what real evil is.  Real evil is describable not in terms of the physical nature, but rather in terms of the inclinations of the heart.  In purely logical terms, of course, Paul is the more literally accurate.  Paul is right to declare that sexual activity can affect the body, and Jesus is incorrect in asserting that what is ingested simply passes out “in the draught.”  Jesus, however, is ultimately correct—and divinely correct—on both scores.  Sexual sin is wrong most importantly in that it dishonors the bond—the one-thing-ness—of a person’s legitimate relationship, and other sins (let us consider here drunkenness, gluttony, substance abuse) are wrong most importantly in that they dishonor the bond--the one-thing-ness--of our relationships to Creation and to the Creator.

At bottom, then, is the importance of understanding that a fundamental presumption of the fact of our existences is our individual existence as part of a whole—however tenuous or extensively broken that whole might be.  We might be tempted to see the roiling, boiling turmoil of the initially-described Creation as a phenomenon of disunity.  Yet who are we to think so?  God at that narratively-described moment was in the company of the host of heaven, and surely the mere physical phenomena of the wave-tossed deep will never be plumbed by us, and must involve endless mysteries of grandeur beyond our ken.  God may have had in mind further developments of his Creation, but who are we to say that either God or Creation was then lacking?

In my next post I will try to show how the puzzle of “things” (though all things are part of one “thing”) has bedeviled the heritage of humanity, and also how understanding this puzzle is intrinsic to understanding the ministry of Jesus.

God or Not Nothing

Certain of the Sadducees asked Jesus who would be the husband in the hereafter of a much-married woman.  After describing the afterlife of humanity as being in some ways like the existence of the angels (an assertion that is left tauntingly undeveloped by Jesus, though it precludes marriage), Jesus says that “as touching the resurrection of the dead, have ye not read that which was spoken unto you by God, saying, I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob?  God is not the God of the dead, but of the living.”

Christianity has delighted in holding up Jesus’ statements here as though they were the irrefutable utterances of a philosopher unequalled in all of history.  Indeed, Jesus is the greatest philosopher in all of history, but it was not his practice to utter irrefutable things.  Jesus’ assertions about the character of God, both in this instance and in others, are not presented as though they were logical postulates such as would be liable to testing, because his assertions about the incomparable qualities of God exist by definition independently of any basis for comparison.

God is, and beside him there is no other.  The “no other” part of the assertion might be taken in its immediate sense as “no other god,” but that semblance of “logic” (to stretch the term) which would disallow any other god in comparison to God must also, if taken to its logical conclusion, result in the realization that if God exists, then nothing else as a comparable entity can exist.  Furthermore, it is inescapable that analysis of the character of God is a fool’s errand.  God’s existence does not place him logically in possession of qualities (such as a loving nature) that can be understood as the quintessence of those qualities.  God does not love perfectly while yet other creatures love imperfectly.  We are drawn (we hope) to God because we feel he loves perfectly while other creatures do not, but that is simply our human nature seeking to embrace a character of God in terms compatible with our understanding of “nature.”  Ultimately (though sterilely) we must reckon that God creates the very love that he displays perfectly.  God is, and so there is love.

When our foundational postulate is “God is,” then at least we can strain toward the clarity increasingly attainable as we return again and again to that postulate.  This is in contradistinction to the unfortunate parody of piety that characterizes much of religion.  For much of religion, the foundational postulate is not “God is,” but rather “The universe has God in it and above it,” or “My life has God in it and above it.”  Placing God thus in a context inevitably leads to his diminishment.

An example of this is seen in the Ryrie Study Bible’s comment on the episode described above.  In response to the passage declaring “God is not the God of the dead, but of the living,” the Study Bible says, “For believers there is life after death, a truth rooted in the character of God.”  Any reasonably earnest student of Christianity and its history of doctrines will be able to sense the ridiculously manipulatable elements of the cobbled-together phrase “For believers there is life after death.”  Is this life “for believers,” while yet unbelievers will exist in sentient form forever, or does “for believers” mean that only “believers” will interpret Jesus’ use of the phrase in a certain way?  How many doctrinally-differing definitions are there of “life,” of “death,” or of “life after death”?

Moreover, what could possibly possess someone to write of “life after death” (or indeed of anything else) as being “rooted in the character of God”?  The God of Jesus is the origin and author of anything that might be called “character” (or, perhaps more revealingly, “characteristics”.)  The slightest inclination to view God as the origin and author of everything will reveal that time means no more to God than he would choose it to mean.  The self-same logic that says that God is the God of the living will dictate that God was the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob before ever they were conceived.  This does not mean that our assessment of the “character of God” is such as would allow our conclusion that he is the sort of supernatural entity who would keep his creatures (or certain of his creatures) “alive” in some sense, for some purposes to suit him.  Rather, our prudent disinclination to opine on the “character of God” will present us with a simple yet baffling postulate: neither time nor anything else need mean anything to God.  God does not fill time and space.  God is not the lord of time and space.  Both of these statements are “true,” yet in some contexts (such as many ramblings about the Sadducee-episode above) they are entirely inadequate.

God is.  Other things “are,” but those things are not comparable to God in other than an evocative sense—this is the most crucial element of understanding about God.  Time and again Jesus confronts people with insoluble questions about God, and time and again (and still) people try to solve the insoluble.  Indeed there are many questions and many puzzles that we need to try to solve, but the last thing we need to do is entangle ourselves with conjectures about the character of God.  In a certain sense, our lives are an internal struggle in which the battle is between devotion to God, on the one hand, and devotion to things other than God, on the other hand.  Among those things that are not God there are better and worse things, and in our creaturely limitations those non-God things will be the things we can act upon.

Ultimately, however, a wholesome sense of the divine will be a sense of otherness—a sense that purposeful devotion must be devotion to a God who will frustrate all our attempts at understanding.  God is the best of anything we can understand, and yet when considering God we must admit that ultimately we understand nothing.  In a sense this is unsurprising—nothing is anything next to God.  Or anything is nothing.  When we consider anything finite we grant it the effectual title of “not nothing.”  When we consider God all else should become nothing.

This, then, should be the balance in our lives.  Not the fanatic’s notion of “God or nothing.”  What we must do continually is weigh our attentions to “God” or to “not nothing.”  God or not nothing.

The Communion That Awaits

One of the most nebulous aspects of the biblical notion of human virtue (or lack thereof) is bound up in the very text itself.  Commentators have tried for centuries to hash out the scriptural assessment of David as being a man after God’s heart—this same David being so ardently after Bathsheba’s charms and Uriah’s life.  And then there is the riotously incongruous contention of Second Peter, that Lot was an upright man, scandalized by his neighbors—whose proximity he chose in the beginning and chose until the final day to abide.  These two notorious examples differ merely in type and degree, of course, from the deceptions and maneuverings of the much-honored Abraham, but they differ crucially from Abraham to the extent that David and Lot were pronounced virtuous, and the commentators have tried to swallow those pronouncements ever since.

Of course, a perpetual Christian industry has been built around the business of proclaiming a person’s moral stature before God as being other than plain to the person’s fellow humans, and I intend here neither to dispute that notion nor to opine on the various theories of forgiveness, atonement, or substitutionary sacrifice presented by the commentators.  What interests me at the moment is the larger question—separated from entanglements with the examples of specific persons—of God’s pronouncements on relative instances of moral stature.  What does God say is “good”?

God calls certain of the elements of Creation good “in the beginning,” and the entirety of Creation he calls very good.  Inasmuch as God knows everything beforehand, it would be as plausible as anything to conjecture that Creation as a whole merited the assessment “very good,” while the implication that it was less than perfect (as anything that was not God) would play out in Creation’s parts themselves being only “good.”  In the beginning (it would seem only prudent to say) Creation was more “very good” than we might ever imagine.  Was Creation initially Heaven, and was Creation (at least potentially) as much Heaven for the First Couple as would be the “paradise” that Jesus promised the Good Thief?  It does not seem that the scriptures (either by themselves or in light of Jesus’ commentary) are concerned with answering that particular question.

Neither does Scripture answer the question of how the perfect God could create something that was less than perfect—or how such a created entity would bear the blame for its inadequacy.  As above, I do not intend to answer those questions.  What I do intend to discuss is the emerging theme in the texts of Creation being initially more “good” than we can imagine, and then displaying symptoms of moral decay.  As I have mentioned often, it seems inescapable that Adam’s discontent with the companionship of God was to some degree a moral failing—whatever its source—and it seems inescapable as well that we (in this mortal realm) are never to know the source of this disconnect.  Neither are we to know the initial blessed state that slipped from us humans.

But we can know that Creation was at first “very good,” and its parts often merited the assessment of “good,” and the part called “Adam” (followed by the part called “Eve”) was somewhat less good in requiring creaturely companionship when God was right there, and then moments (or years or eons) later the parts called “Adam and Eve” committed the acts that are traditionally (and presumptuously) labeled “The Fall.”  And things became still worse after that.

Creation became degraded because of sin, and the natural order was disturbed, and violence and competition set in.  “Man” got worse and worse, and “every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.”  Of course, this last statement from Genesis is no more to be taken as definitive than God’s initial description of Creation as “very good.”  What exactly do such assessments mean?  If “every imagination of the thoughts” of humanity was “only evil continually,” how then were generations of helpless (and tiresomely demanding) children brought up?  And would not the “evil” of each succeeding generation be—in all fairness—assessed on a sliding scale comparable to the quality of their upbringing?

Jesus, of course, explodes such contemplations.  He tells us that we, though we are evil, know how to give good things to our children.  We are only so bad or so good—at least as we can subject ourselves to our own observation.  What matters, then, is the question of how we can align ourselves properly with moral demands, properly understood.  And, unfortunately, in the vein of the discussion so far, there is the question of what any further degradation of one’s moral state might look like.  We are a rather depressing lot, but in light of the scriptures and of Jesus’ teachings, how might we get even worse?

When it comes to the question of how we might get even worse, there are Jesus’ warnings about how we are going through life.  And then there are Jesus’ warnings about how we must give up our lives.  Our “lives,” it must be presumed, are moral traps: to just go about living is to get—in the final moral analysis—worse and worse.  We are presented, as was Jesus, with the Temptations.  We seek our own sustenance, we seek our own safety, we seek self-actualization.  Or to use the language of the Temptations, we concern ourselves with bread, we concern ourselves with the minor dangers of stones or the fatal dangers of precipices, and we concern ourselves with our places in the world—our possession of “kingdoms” great or small.

Interlaced among Jesus’ contentions that we must give up our lives are his promises that still greater lives are available to us, here and now as well as in eternity.  In this dichotomy can be seen the choice of proceeding downward or upward: we proceed downward as we pursue our own lives (leading us to multiply Adam’s dissatisfactions endlessly), and we proceed upward as we pursue “life,” which now as ever is about the communion with God to which we are ungrateful heirs.

The sorry business of going downward is seen precisely in the frustration of God’s (and Jesus’) intention of communion.  To become nothing is to become everything that might matter, for to become nothing (or the servant of all) is to partake of the life of all.  On the other hand, there is nothing worse than to stand in effectual defiance of God—apart from whom we have no being—by conceiving of oneself as a truly separate entity (even while perhaps denigrating oneself in the most demonstrative terms.)

The sorry business of going downward is seen precisely, for example, in the contrasting examples of Judas and Peter.  It is truly gut-wrenching to consider how centuries of popular imagination have seen Judas’ misdeeds as the most horrific imaginable, while Peter’s are quickly bathed in our soothing assertions that, after all, any of us might have behaved similarly.  Judas was beset with all-too-human greed (though one wonders what he ever found to do with his pilferings, and he might perhaps otherwise have sold his miraculous abilities to the highest bidder), Judas was at least cognizant of the question of how best to use the group’s resources, Judas was beset by the devil in the same milieu in which so many innocents were similarly beset, Judas did what he did while prompted to an extent by Jesus.  Judas felt remorse, Judas returned his evil blood-money, Judas hanged himself.  Judas was a sorry character.

Peter, on the other hand, was presented on a memorable occasion with Jesus predicting his own death as he intended to meld himself to sinful humanity and share the punishment for their sins.  Jesus was going to make himself the servant of all and was going to make his life a thing that mattered only insofar as it was sacrificed to the larger life of all who would choose the true life of the Kingdom.  Peter wanted Jesus to do something else.  In the simplest sense (the sense least risky in terms of our conjectures) Peter wanted to have a life in which Jesus retained his own life.  Jesus’ rebuke to Peter’s objection was to call Peter “Satan.”  Peter, in a manner that makes the sin of grubby Judas seem like child’s play, was staring into the very abyss.  Peter was seeking to frustrate the very logic that has permeated the scriptural account of Creation’s decline, and Peter was seeking to frustrate Jesus’ incomparable logic of salvation from that decline.  Jesus was going to sacrifice himself for the communion forsaken by creaturely beings from “the beginning,” and Peter—Adam-like—was looking for creaturely companionship.

It is then supremely fitting that Peter (with all the rest of The Eleven) betrays Jesus in the Garden as surely as Judas did, for as Jesus said, whoever was not with him was against him.  Of course, we all betray Jesus innumerable times every day.  David and Lot and Abraham betrayed Jesus innumerable times every day.  On the other hand, the greatest thing that Jesus gives us is the realization that infinite opportunities exist for us to reach for the communion that awaits us upon every instance of self-extinction—every instance of giving up our lives for the one life of the Kingdom.

Truth Needs Tending

In my last post, I described how “we must rely on the old that we know (or think we know) in addition to the new.  Jesus recognizes this when he speaks of the scribe and a store of knowledge new and old.  He also recognizes, however, (in an extension of the ‘wine’ analogy) how people are apt to prefer the old.  We want to be able to rely on what we think we know.”  Our original task in sorting this matter out must be found by us in our notions of the very origins of our existence.

Adam (in a pristine original state that is idiotically considered by many theologians to be “sinlessness”) is placed in the Garden to tend it.  The man has tasks to perform, and it would be cheap convenience on our part for us to imagine that he would not have had to learn things and to remember things, or to imagine that he would not have felt either frustration or temptation to indulge negative thoughts.  Eve, we must remember, shared Adam’s original state, and yet it must be conceded that she thought negative things about God before ever she ate of the tree.  As I (and I’m sure many others before me) have written, if Adam had reached out to intercept Eve’s imprudent grasp, the woman’s state at that moment could not be described honestly as “sinlessness.”

Mankind (if not viewed through an imposed lens of manipulative theology) has always been mankind.  God, when he observes that it is not good for the man to be alone (though provided the opportunity for communion with his Maker), is not recorded as noting that Adam’s character has changed.  The question of Adam’s original moral state (less than perfect though created by a morally perfect God) is no different from—and indistinguishable in insolubility from—the very question of how a God who encompasses all can create something apart from himself.  We are things in ourselves, and we are not God.  That is how it is.

To return, then, to the matter of how “we must rely on the old that we know (or think we know) in addition to the new”—is really nothing more than to return to the ancient philosopher’s notion of discovering the basis of our thought-lives.  Christianity, unfortunately, has forfeit the opportunity to find such grounding in the “genesis” of its theology.  The belief system espoused by Jesus, on the other hand, begins with stories.  Jesus emphasizes the lessons of the stories, not their particulars.  A seed, for example, that falls to the ground and dies is a seed that is dead.  The “seed” that Jesus is referencing is a matter for consideration, not an actuality to be analyzed.

There are two important lessons to be gleaned from the grounding of Jesus’ teachings in the ancient stories.  The first is a simple one, yet it frames the second lesson and ought to undergird all of our thoughts.  This is the lesson of Adam at first in the Garden, going about his duties.  Anything he thought he learned he might misremember, and anything he thought he knew he might in fact have fashioned to his tastes, rendering it more or less untruthful.  Adam’s chief task is the task that is ever and always ours: the tending of truth.  Truth needs tending.  “Truth” that is thought by us to be held by us, understood by us, unquestioned by us—such “Truth” is the altar of an idol-god, if not the god itself.

The second lesson that must come from the grounding of Jesus’ teachings in the ancient stories is found, as I mentioned above, in the essential thrust in the stories themselves and how Jesus uses them.  A story tells a lesson—a story is not a compendium of ancillary facts.  Indeed, in the larger sense, truth as we might understand it can consist of no more than lessons that we might misunderstand couched in contexts and complexities that we might also misunderstand.  The paring-back of any lesson to its kernel—and the continual examination of that kernel from every vantage-point available—is always our duty.

The manifestation of the opposite of this duty is found—lamentably—in much of Christian theology.  A powerful imagery—and a powerful warning against our infatuation with the things of this world—is found in the Temptation-accounts’ quoting of the devil declaring that the kingdoms of this world have been given to him.  The imagery and the warning, however, are all that exist in the story, and yet some theologians will use the Temptation-accounts (varying though they be in the manuscripts) as treatises on the stature of the devil.  “The earth is the Lord’s” is an eternal strain in the belief system that Jesus espouses, and he enjoins his followers to glean simple lessons from a Creation that reflects the benevolence of God.  Give a theologian (or worse yet, a theocrat) a chance, however, and that person might use the devil’s self-described mastery of the world as an excuse to demand that every wholesome objection to theological tyranny is a work of the devil.  And all because the devil’s claim to ownership of the kingdoms of the world—a claim directed by the universe’s greatest liar at a physically-depleted Jesus—is not countered (or is ignored) by Jesus in the story?

We are always trying to impose meaning on our lives.  This, at least in part, explains why we will make up stories (not always a bad thing) and why we will impose our own meanings on existing stories (a somewhat more problematic thing.)  Please note that I referred to our trying to “impose” meaning on our lives, not to “find” meaning.  This is one of the most important things that I find myself trying clumsily to impart through “roused, readied, reaped.”  “Roused” in our lives can often be a most disagreeable thing.  What I have considered all along is the disciples being roused by Jesus in the garden.  To be “roused” (though our immediate experience might be something or some things rising in ourselves) is to have a set of conditions imposed from without.

What we tend to do in response to being “roused” is usually described, however, in misleading terms.  We “respond”, and so feel ourselves to be the subjects of imposition.  This, however, is one of the greatest types of self-delusion.  When we respond to a set of stimuli, we are in reality responding to a constructed (however hastily-constructed or poorly-constructed) conception of our making.  We collect stimuli and impose meaning on them.  This type of scenario is merely a miniature of our overall response (I use “response” somewhat ironically) to existence itself.  Existence is imposed on us, and we impose ourselves on existence.  It is with a correspondingly sardonic approach that we must address our perpetual protestations that we are merely trying to “find meaning” in our lives.  Balderdash.  We are trying to paste meaning on our lives.  We encounter meaning in our lives inadvertently, and usually (think Jesus in the Gospels) when we have placed our lives aside.

The experiential cycles of “roused, readied, reaped”—long or short, overlapping or seemingly all-consuming, beginning in our lives before we are ever aware of them—are misleading even in the use of “experiential” to describe them.  We do not merely “experience” the cycles—we respond to them, and then we experience the responses, which set off new cycles, and so on.  Unsurprisingly, we throw off into every available tangent our own expressions—our own impositions—of meaning.  To be in this tumble of confusion is what it is to be an imperfect being in the state of, well, being.  We would do well to consider what it is to be a sentient being that exists.  Our mere physical state would be no more—and no more dishonorable—than that of a stone.  Our ability to be sense-receptors would not equate to us being thinking entities.  It must be—as though a purely clinical analysis could be applied—our ability to extract meaning from stimuli that would establish us as sentient beings.

Yet we will allow that stimuli—the information-sources that frame a scenario for our consideration—must be less than (or other than) the scenario itself, and so are limited.  Similarly, our ability to extract meaning is limited.  If we are not God, it would seem inescapable that any experience of sentience available to us is bound to the phenomenon of seizing on a conception of imperfect warrant and overlooking that imperfection.  Our thoughts are the cousins of lies, and the truth itself is a more distant relation—if indeed any of our thoughts are of—shall we say—uncontested parentage.

These musings are not particularly profound, yet if our thought-lives are similarly un-profound, then we should expect that elevated teachings directed at us must be teachings that we address (if in good conscience) in the most basic and unassuming vein.  A snake spoke to Eve in the Garden.  Snakes don’t speak.  The account doesn’t say that the snake is the devil.  What the snake in the account does say is the sort of thing that Eve—indeed any of us—might say to ourselves.  Indeed, what the snake in the account does say is the sort of thing that any of us might entertain and then—in the ancient human fashion—feign (and ultimately delude ourselves) to be the mere imposition of reality.  If the snake didn’t say what was said to Eve, then something else would.

What matters is that Eve ate of the tree, that she stood there moments before intending evilly to eat from the tree, that she stood there moments before that wickedly defaming God in her conversation with the snake, and that in every moment of her existence before that the shared Adam’s desire for creaturely companionship when God was right there all along.  And we are going to devote volumes of theology to a snake?

Moreover, of course, the effectual Christian snake-worship of centering on the narrative of the supposed momentary Fall has allowed for endless churnings-out of snake-oil theologies, while the morally-fatal disease of pretending to be a respondent to, rather than a participant in, the teaching process of Jesus is left unattended.  As I wrote in the previous post, to have “ears to hear” is to always hear anew, a necessary practice that we can attend to only when we understand that “understanding” something can mean only lurching from one partial apprehension to another.

And we must understand that each “understanding” is attended inevitably by some element of imposed meaning attributable to us.  With this we must contend.  I no more than anyone else have a perfect formula for this, but here at least I can present an example.  The snake in the supposed Fall narrative serves as a device.  The “enmity” part that follows has no more immediate substance than a “Just So” story to explain humanity’s discomfort with snakes.  In the tower of Babel story, by contrast, there is an explicit reference to humanity wishing to make a name for themselves and not be scattered over the earth.  To whom is this name to be broadcast—or at least is such a name to be specific to a centered locality on earth?  The only truly sentient beings on Earth in the biblical conception were humans—supernatural beings would not be tied to a terrestrial realm, and the greatest way for humanity to create a name for themselves would be for humanity to fill the earth with accomplishments.

It seems that the “name” part of the tower of Babel story—not merely furthering the narrative—is a description of humanity’s perennial imposition of meaning on surrounding circumstances.  As is ever our tendency, the people after the Flood say the Earth—containing only themselves and the rescued species on its surface—was populated by innumerable sentient other-beings.  Such is how we impose meaning on our existence, now as ever.  Such is what happens when we forget that truth needs tending, and instead we let degraded truth, and partial truths, lead to untruths.